We will outlive and outsmart the bigots
-Dan Savage
From my previous post, Wrong Side of History part 3, I mentioned Dan Savage’s appearance on the Colbert Report. Dan Savage said that homosexuals are going to outlive the bigots. I would love to see the demographic research from which this claim is based. I did some research of my own and found this website: Sampling of Latter-day Saint/Utah Demographics and Social Statistics from National Sources
Here are some highlights, but you might want to read the whole article:
- Utah was ranked as the #1 best state in which to raise children in the 1996 rankings by the Children’s Right’s Council.
- The latest federal health figures (1997) rank Utah as having the fewest births to unwed mothers.
- Utah women again labored to the highest birthrate — by far — among the states in 1999.
- Utah women also delivered the lowest percentage of babies out of wedlock.
- Utah’s “fertility rate” — the number of live births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 — was 93.1. (one of the highest in the nation and the world).
- Utah “spends a larger percentage of state dollars on education” than any other state.
- Nationally, the suicide rate among 20- to 34-year old males was 2.5 to 3 times higher than among active LDS church members of the same age.
- National demographic studies indicate that couples in which both partners are Latter-day Saints (and who marry in a Latter-day Saint temple) have the lowest divorce rate among all U.S. social and religious groups studied.
- Due in part to their emphasis on missionary work and education, combined with higher than average Internet use, the Latter-day Saint population in general exhibits higher than average awareness of geography, languages, and religious/cultural diversity.
- As Latter-day Saints become more educated, they are more likely to be active Church participants, a trend opposite what is found in most denominations.
I am only including about 10% of the facts included in this website. The facts I didn’t include reiterate a few trends. Utahns/Mormons are reproducing prolifically. Utahns/Mormons are among the healthiest constituencies in the country, and therefore have a high life-expectancy rate. Utahns/Mormons are well-educated and open to cultural diversity. Finally, the studies demonstrate the validity of the LDS sponsored belief that the foundation of a healthy society is to encourage monogamous, mutual heterosexual unions. The LDS Church didn’t encourage voters to support Proposition 8, because they hate homosexuals. Church members encouraged the passage of Proposition 8 because the LDS Church members know that the Church’s teachings work, and this claim can be backed up with scientific statistical evidence all day long. These statistics become even more relevant when you compare them to a similar study on the homosexual community: ‘Gay marriage’ and homosexuality: Some medical comments
- A study of homosexual men shows that more than 75% of homosexual men admitted to having sex with more than 100 different males in their lifetime: approximately 15% claimed to have had 100-249 sex partners, 17% claimed 250-499, 15% claimed 500-999 and 28% claimed more than 1,000 lifetime sexual partners.
- Far higher rates of promiscuity are observed even within ‘committed’ gay relationships than in heterosexual marriage: In Holland, male homosexual relationships last, on average, 1.5 years, and gay men have an average of eight partners a year outside of their supposedly “committed” relationships.
- The high rates of promiscuity are not surprising: Gay authors admit that ‘gay liberation was founded … on a sexual brotherhood of promiscuity.’
- a large number of diseases are associated with anal intercourse, many of which are rare or even unknown in the heterosexual population such as: anal cancer, Chlamydia trachomatis, Cryptosporidium, Giardia lamblia, Herpes simplex virus, HIV, Human papilloma virus, Isospora belli, Microsporidia, Gonorrhoea, Syphilis, Hepatitis B and C and others.
- While ‘always’ condom use reduces the risk of contracting HIV by about 85%, Condoms, even when used 100% of the time, fail to give adequate levels of protection against many non-HIV STDs such as Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, Herpes, Genital Warts and others. The only safe sex is, apart from abstinence, mutual monogamy with an uninfected partner.
- There are increased rates of mental ill health among the homosexual population compared to the general population. Many studies show much higher rates of psychiatric illness, such as depression, suicide attempts and drug abuse among homosexuals then among the general population. The homosexual lifestyle is associated with a shortened life expectancy of up to 20 years. (my emphasis).
- life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, it is estimated that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years will not reach their 65th birthday.
- There is an overlap between the ‘gay movement’ and the movement to make pedophilia acceptable through organisations such as the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), as admitted by David Thorstad, Co-founder of NAMBLA writing in the Journal of Homosexuality.
- the average length of a ‘committed’ homosexual relationship was only 1.5 years. In the mentioned survey of nearly 8,000 gays, 71% of relationships did not last 8 years. Furthermore, violence among homosexual partnerships is two to three times as common as in heterosexual relationships. Such an environment does not provide the stability required for raising children. Former homosexual Stephen Bennett who is married to his wife and has two children states: ‘Granting homosexuals the right to marry or adopt children is deliberately creating dysfunctional families.’
on 
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Homosexuality isn’t going away.
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002282
Your statistics on homosexual relationships are woefully lacking in information on lesbian relationships, which weakens the effectiveness of your argument a bit. Your statistics are definitely not without bias and some of them seem blatantly outlandish. Honestly, 75% of gay men say they’ve had more than 100 sex partners? Ludicrous. Also, could it be that homosexual relationships are shorter-lived not because of infidelity, but because society condemns them?
When I was informed that I was a regular reader of the blog, I took it upon myself to read back-entries. I found one quite telling.
First, you seem enormously comfortable using the words “mormons”, “utah” and “bigots” interchangably. Dan Savage says the Gays will outlive the bigots, but you counter by talking up Utah/Mormon demographics. There are some of us who are both from Utah and Mormon who take no part this particular bigotry.
And, if you were to do demographic research, you’d find he’s closer to right than you may care to admit. 20 years ago, attitudes towards homosexuality were stagnant. Presently, they are quite fluid (yes, even in Utah) . Straight young persons today are much less likely to see homosexual unions as doing them any particular harm.
I think this is well summed up by Adam Felber, who wrote:
“This gay marriage thing is tearing my wife and me apart. Now, because of activist judges in Massachusetts and overzealous officials in San Francisco, our union is hanging on by the thinnest of threads.
Back in the simpler days of 2002, when we were planning our wedding, Jeanne and I used to coo fondly at each other about the joys that lay ahead. It wasn’t that we were unsupportive of our gay friends, no. We were just looking forward to the government’s validation of our relationship’s specialness – a license that affirmed that the two of us had made a unique and personal eternal vow to each other. Something uniquer and specialer than any of our homosexual acquaintances could ever even hope for.
We’re all for the separation of church and state, naturally, but if the government doesn’t define marriage as the sacred union between a man and a woman, who will? Are Jeanne and I expected to treasure our union solely on the basis of our deep love, personal beliefs, public vows, and the government’s blessing? Sorry, Judge Pinkypants, but that’s just not good enough. Not for us. We need to know that we’ve got something that’s only available to 90% of the population, the select and upstanding few. Sure, some of us are criminals. Murderers, even. Some of us have committed rape, beaten children, tattooed swastikas on our bodies, abused animals, broken into houses, bilked the government out of millions of tax dollars, lied under oath, cheated on previous spouses, dishonored our fathers and mothers, failed to keep the Sabbath holy, mowed down pedestrians in our SUV’s while intoxicated, coveted our neighbors’ stuff, gotten ourselves put on death row, sold military secrets to the Chinese, urinated in public places, beaten up people who looked or sounded different than us, and sold drugs in schoolyards.
But we’re straight, and that means we can get married. And that’s special. Or, at least it was. These are dark times in my household. My wife and I look at each other with haunted, suspicious eyes, feeling like we’ve bought a whole bunch of shares in a stock that is about to be devalued. Suddenly, the eternal, personal vows that we swore to each other will mean very little. We’ll basically become roommates who happen to wear matching rings, while meanwhile out our window we’ll see gays and penguins feeding each other wedding cake willy-nilly on our very own street corner.
That’s why we need a Constitutional amendment that will protect marriage for straight people. Until we have the right to enter that sacred union, violate it, exit it, and enter it again with somebody else, again and again, regardless of what crimes we commit, until we’re too old and feeble to mouth the words, “I do,” – unless we have that right and gay people don’t, then there is truly nothing sacred in the United States of America.”
Horray for the Bigots/Utahns/Mormons! As somebody who counts himself all three, I’m sad you see no need to make the distinction.
First of all, your ability to use pronouns correctly is abysmal.
Second of all, to say that I use the terms Utahns, Mormons, and bigots interchangeably seems like a pointless assertion. After all, after Prop 8 passed, gay rights activists were the ones assigning the blanket label of “bigot” to all Utahns and Mormons. I was just trying to engage this issue through the paradigm that had been created by a minority group (gay rights advocates) that seems to have just as much tendency towards bigotry as either myself or Utahns or anyone for that matter.
I like the quote from Adam Felber. This was a nice rhetorical touch from someone who has a tendency to just want to play “logical fallacy gotcha.”
However, Felber is certainly not addressing what got me so riled up about the issue of gay marriage. I honestly don’t see gay marriage as a threat to the sanctity of my marriage or the idea of heterosexual marriage in general. If you’ve read further back in my blog, you will see that I really wasn’t too interested in gay marriage. I wasn’t actively campaigning to pass proposition 8. I didn’t donate money or time. I was just going to let the chips fall and move on.
When I saw the gay rights movement’s pathological reaction to the passage of Proposition 8, I was quickly converted to the anti-gay-rights movement cause.
I went from being an ambivalent bystander to one who now has absolutely no tolerance for the gay rights movement. As someone who seems to sympathize with the gay rights movement, it might be productive question to ask yourself, “what was it about the gay rights movement’s reaction to the passage of Propostion 8 that would have caused an otherwise reasonable person to now so vehemently oppose our cause?”
While you are asking yourself questions, here are a few more:
“Why do I insist that the reason that heterosexuals oppose homosexual marriage is that homosexual marriage violates the sanctity of heterosexual marriage?”
“Can I label someone else as a hateful bigot without also becoming a participant in hateful bigotry? If so, who determines who gets to participate in hateful bigotry?”
Ulitmately, I don’t care if homosexuality violates the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. However, I think that politicizing something as deeply personal and private as sexuality is a big mistake, but this is another discussion for another time.
Touchee on my pronoun foibles. In fairness, though, I always intend to write a few words, but I just keep going, and these tiny boxes just don’t lend to adequate proofreading. But to quickly answer your questions:
1. I insist because I have heard it ad infinitum from the church (members and pulpit). That and it might turn teetering children into that “lifestyle.”
2. That’s a real puzzle. I like to refrain from the name game, personally. I really don’t know how that would work.
I’m 100% on board with you about politicising something so personal. (This is where I let my libertarian flag fly.) But guilt on this issue runs both ways. Conservative states have used gay marriage amendments to get their conservatives to the polls for lo these past 20 years, predominantly in the South. And I was out of the country during the whole hoopla over prop 8. I heard about the mess after the election (and was quickly baptised into the other camp, based on our shared religious principles: “teach correct principles and let the people…” J.S. and “I’m convinced our Father in Heaven’s commitment to agency runs so much deeper than our own” Neal Maxwell). But you’re right. Debates for later times.